New Faculty Profile: Chelsea Rosenthal, Philosophy

December 19, 2018
Print

By Amanda Maxwell, FASS

The latest addition to the faculty in the Department of Philosophy, Chelsea Rosenthal, swapped New York city views this September for the mountains and wilderness scenery of her Burnaby Campus office. While the new view is inspiring, her motivation to join the Department of Philosophy comes from its incredibly supportive, collegial environment as well as its alignment with her research interests.

"I am excited to be involved with the recently-launched Law and Philosophy Concentration,” she explains. “Having research interests in legal philosophy, it’s an area that I find especially fun to teach.”

Rosenthal, who comes from the Center for Bioethics at New York University, has a BA (Bryn Mawr), MA (University of Virginia) and completed her doctoral work in philosophy at New York University. She also has a JD from the New York University School of Law; Rosenthal sees this not as a detour from philosophy but an opportunity to gain better insights and inform her own philosophical interests. She acknowledges that her academic path is long and winding, but describes it as ideal for gaining more legal background for her research interests.

“I went to law school knowing that I probably would never practice law,” she explains. “JD/PhDs are actually becoming fairly common for people working in philosophy of law.”
Her fascination with law is longstanding. Rosenthal has been interested in political and legal philosophy since her undergrad years, recently adding ethics while working on her dissertation in grad school.

“When I was working on my dissertation, I ended up wanting to chase down the answers to some more foundational ethical questions to get the framework in place for answering the more applied questions I was originally interested in,” she explains.

Her dissertation, Ethics for Fallible People, looks at moral uncertainty. Rosenthal describes this as situations where people want to do the right thing, but are just not sure what the right thing is. She is interested in what it means to navigate that uncertainty in an ethical and responsible way, asking, how should I navigate to get to moral decision-making? Rosenthal ends up arguing that being too reckless in the face of moral uncertainty can itself be morally bad.

“Morally, we ought to use good strategies for trying to be moral,” she summarizes.
This interest the process behind moral decision making was partly inspired by law school classes setting out the ethical responsibilities of lawyers.

Rosenthal's dissertation explored how we handle situations where we're unsure what morality calls for. The term ‘hedging your bets’ is often used to describe one approach people take: avoiding behavior just in case it's wrong. Professor Hedgie, knitted by a friend of Rosenthal’s to celebrate the defense of her dissertation, sits on her desk as a constant reminder.

Rosenthal explains that if we accept traditional views of lawyers’ ethical responsibilities, lawyers are in a tough place when it comes to navigating uncertainty. The general public often has the option of avoiding a morally questionable activity, just in case it’s wrong. But lawyers’ competing responsibilities may leave them without that option. On the one hand, lawyers are usually told they ethically must follow the law. And on the other hand, they’re usually told that they ethically must do almost anything short of breaking the law, if it will benefit their client.

Fulfilling both of these responsibilities at once requires a lot of precision! So, when lawyers face uncertainty or ambiguity (as they often do), they can’t simply avoid questionable activities just in case they’re wrong. Avoiding wronging their client might lead to breaking the law, and avoiding breaking the law might lead to wronging their client. So, the traditional view of lawyers’ ethical responsibilities will need to give better guidance for how to navigate uncertainty – and we may also have some doubts about that traditional view.

Rosenthal will explore a related question as a topic in the Philosophy of Law course she is teaching in the spring – can lawyers ethically represent people who have done reprehensible deeds?
In addition to expanding on topics related to her dissertation, Rosenthal is exploring another project with current relevance – privacy. She is interested in the way that privacy violations especially in social media and our digital lives push us to live under near-constant surveillance.

“Surveillance catches us out-of-context. So, if we want our choices to seem justifiable when we’re under surveillance, we can end up leading lives of soundbites, rather than building a richer, long-term life narrative.”